Mary Blakley Ceramics was a joint venture that was established and run by Tom and Mary Blakley in the mid-1960s. After Tom’s death in 1984, Mary continued the business. It ceased to exist upon Mary’s death in 2004.

Tom Blakley was born in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where his father and uncle, who were in the road construction business, were working.  By around 1915, Tom’s parents had moved to Fort Wayne, Indiana.  He attended the Fort Wayne public schools and graduated from North Side High School in 1928.

Mary Margaret was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the daughter of teachers.  She attended the Fort Wayne public schools and graduated from South Side High School in 1930.

Tom and Mary met at the Fort Wayne Art School, a commercial and fine arts school located at 1026 W. Berry St. in Fort Wayne.  Tom went on to take classes at the Art Students League in New York City in the early 1930s, where he studied under the well-known German satiric cartoonist, George Grosz.  Mary accompanied him and they both soaked up the art scene in New York during those years, making frequent trips to Harlem where Mary heard Ella Fitzgerald in a nightclub long before she appeared on the national music scene. The two of them also witnessed the installation and subsequent destruction of Diego Rivera’s mural, Man at the Crossroads.

They were married in Fort Wayne in 1936 and moved to Miami in 1940 and then to Homestead in 1949.  Tom was a cartoonist by trade whose work appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, Colliers, and many trade magazines.  By the late 1950s, that market had started to change in a direction that didn’t appeal to Tom, so he started cartooning in clay and the two founded Mary Blakley Ceramics in 1966.

I’ve established this website in an effort to make the work of Tom and Mary Blakley more well-known. For all of the time that Mary Blakley Ceramics existed, their work was not regarded favorably by the mainstream ceramics community. This was because their work was commercial, colorful and didn’t follow the rules that “real ceramics” had to be glazed in subdued shades of earth colors and be fired to, at least, cone 10. “Real ceramics” also had to be thrown on the wheel, not hand-built. Those rules didn’t stop their devoted customers from buying their work – some of those fans have 40 or more pieces of their work in their collections. Their commercial work was whimsical, humorous, brightly colored, and inexpensive, all of which was diametrically opposed to “real ceramics”, which was very serious, expensive, and glazed in subdued colors. Their fine art was also brightly colored and inexpensive, which was a strike against that part of their oeuvre also.

It’s hard to characterize their work, but I’ve often thought of both of them as being watercolorists using clay as a canvas for their colorful glazes. That, of course, is a no-no: either be a watercolorist or a ceramist who follows the rules established by academia. Neither of them had much respect for academically trained artists, particularly those who would not experiment with glazes and color. There have been some who have called their work ‘vernacular’ or ‘folk art’, but I don’t think that is correct, either, because they were both trained artists. It really doesn’t matter what category the critics try to place their work in, does it? What matters is that people love and cherish their pieces.

I hope to correct some of these misperceptions by presenting their work for a wider community. Perhaps, in an age when energy is becoming increasingly expensive, clay artists will begin to throw off the shackles of convention and appreciate those who challenge the rules. After all, isn’t that what artists do?